Page 9 - October_Newsletter_2024

Steve Orrell filing system

4 drives

1. PC: OS Windows 11 Pro, Applications, Personal Data

2. PC: Photos, Movies, Music, Backup images of Drive 1 (Macrium)
3. Google Drive (cloud): Insurance docs, Manuals, Utilities

4. NAS (Linux): Backup - Personal Data, Photos, Movies, Music,
Media server - (Plex)

Mapped to Windows File Explorer

Steve then showed the setup on his main PC. This currently has two physical drives. Drive 1 has the operat-
ing system and applications and is an NVMe drive, which is much faster than a traditional disk. His Drive 2
is a larger rotating HDD, and has his datafiles as well as a backup of his main drive.

He also uses Google Drive to store various important files to which he might need access whilst not at his
PC, e.g. on holiday, or outside, as he can still access these via his phone. Finally, he has a NAS system which
has the backups of his files as well as acting as a media server using Plex software. This allows him to dis-
tribute music and pictures to other devices, e.g. Sonos or a TV.

Alan talked about some of the options within Windows File Explorer. Although the default may be to list
files in alphabetical order, you can easily change this to date order or file type order, by clicking on relevant
the column heading. This can be very useful when trying to find a particular type of file, e.g. .doc or .jpg. A
double click will also give you the files in reverse order, e.g Z-A, or oldest first.

Alan also talked of one person he knew that always started every file name with the date, e.g.
“20240918Melton ComputerClub.doc”. He claimed that it made it easier to find files.

Alan commented that the best idea is to set up a folder structure that makes sense to you, don’t just dump
everything in “Documents”, keep it organised. He also warned about having too many icons/files on the
desktop. This slows the machine performance and makes it harder to find things.

There was some discussion of the shortcomings of Windows search, and Steve mentioned a free utility called
“Everything” https://www.voidtools.com/en-us/. This performs a very fast search of the whole computer,
including NAS drives if required, and lets you find files by a partial match on the name or filetype or other
criteria.

Derek opened the evening by talking about how the default file locations are configured in Word and Excel.
All the Microsoft Office suite are similar, and their default is to place your files in c:\users\{username}
\documents. You can change this if you want, or just use sub-folders within Documents.

Derek explained that he uses his Synology NAS box as the default file storage as this means that he can ac-